Better Prisons: Less Crime (Justice and Home Affairs Committee Report)

Lord Sandhurst Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sandhurst (Con)]

My Lords, this has been an illuminating debate on a most important report. I will come to the report shortly, but first I will address the five compelling and varied maiden speeches.

First, the noble Baroness, Lady Bi, comes with an exceptional career in the law behind her, and no doubt still ahead. I am sure she will, from what I have heard and read, give voice not just to the important interests of the City of London but to the interests of the vulnerable and of the arts.

Secondly, my noble friend Lord Redwood is an eminent parliamentarian of 36 years’ standing. He was astute to identify that failures in productivity in public service are a central issue today, as they have been for many years, not just in the field of prisons but across our society. He was right to stress the importance of quality and efficiency. We will all benefit from his experience and insight.

Thirdly, we had the noble Lord, Lord Babudu. He is the executive director of Impact on Urban Health, which works to develop the potential for cities to be healthier. His experience in that, and more particularly at the sharp end of knife crime, of which he told us a little, will give the House valuable insights, and we should listen to him.

Fourthly, we had the noble Baroness, Lady Davies of Devonport. She was a remarkable athlete and an Olympian of great distinction. She has built on that platform to campaign on and highlight, based on her own experience, the misuse and particular dangers of hormonal drugs, both in sport and for teenage health. Further, she understands the importance of a level playing field in all respects and the need to provide decent facilities for women prisoners. We will surely benefit from her experience and wisdom.

Last but not least, we had the noble Baroness, Lady Neate. She is the newest of our Cross-Bench people’s Peers. She will be a valuable addition, not least because she was the chief executive officer of Shelter, a charity of which I am a long-standing supporter. Her expertise in the important field of delivering legal services for social welfare will be valuable to this House, as will her work with Women’s Aid.

I turn to the report. I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Motion and acknowledge the hard work of the Justice and Home Affairs Committee in producing the Better Prisons: Less Crime report. I declare that I was a member of this committee until December 2024, and that I took part in the first stages of its evidence gathering. I congratulate its chair, the noble Lord, Lord Foster of Bath, on not only his truly compelling speech today but his work as chair of that committee when I served on it.

The report—noble Lords will be glad to hear that I shall not attempt to address every facet of it—provides a stark account of a system under acute pressure and engaged too often in firefighting. I am grateful to the committee for laying out their recommendations so clearly. The consequences of doing nothing are real for us all: offenders, staff and the public. Something must be done.

Our prisons are now at a critical point—we all know that; we hear it too often, but they are strained to the point where their core missions of public protection and rehabilitation are compromised. Those conclusions mirror what has been reported by HM Inspectorate of Prisons. At times they go further. Overcrowding and violence are persistent realities and too many prisons are quite unable to provide regimes capable of reducing reoffending. Apart from locking people up to keep them away from us and keep us safe, prevention of reoffending is what prisons should be about. As my noble friend Lady Buscombe, in her elegant speech, showed by reference to what she had said over 20 years ago, in 2005, the political class in this country has failed to address the issues that this report brings to light.

I turn to the newish issue of Islamic extremism in prisons. Last year, the Conservative Party raised concerns about the threat posed by Islamist extremist inmates. We were not the only ones to do so, but it is an important issue. This followed violent attacks on staff by high-profile extremist offenders and evidence of organised radicalisation within the estate. Indeed, I myself asked a Question on this in this House. Islamist gangs inside prisons have held makeshift sharia-style trials and groomed vulnerable inmates. Some prisoners apparently seized power in certain wings.

That problem sits alongside other well-recognised safety problems, and these have to be tackled robustly. The Government and His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service must work better together as a united team. They must ensure that effective specialist counter-extremism units exist, and staff must be trained to identify and respond to radicalisation threats before they metastasise into actual violence. The attack in April 2025 at a separation centre, where extremist inmates used hot oil and improvised weapons against officers, was horrifying and underlines the urgency of this issue.

On reoffending and purposeful activity, the committee’s analysis of these issues—and we have heard other speeches from noble Lords on this—cannot be faulted. As for purposeful activity, the report is spot on. It rightly identifies and links lack of work, education and training with higher levels of self-harm, unrest and, most importantly for all of us, reoffending. The Government appear to recognise this. In their manifesto for the last election they pledged to

“work with prisons to improve offenders’ access to purposeful activity, such as learning, and ensure they create pre-release plans for those leaving custody”.

Much has to be done. There is a worrying new dimension. The Chief Inspector of Prisons recently stated that, in Manchester, 35% of prisoners were locked up all day. That is absolutely staggering and terrible.

On education, I was disappointed to read that independent watchdogs and monitoring boards, to which we should listen, have described seismic cuts to prison education provision. Some 300 education staff were recently made redundant—that is not the way forward. Reports indicate reductions in core classroom education of 25% across the country; in some prisons, the drop is as much as 60%. Governors have had to make teaching roles redundant and to slash the number of courses available, yet this Government have acknowledged that education is one of the most effective tools to break the cycle of offending. Something must be done; this must be put right. The noble Lord, Lord Farmer, was right to stress this and to draw on his own experience and expertise in this field. We want to stop reoffending—we all do.

The cuts here undermine the principles that we all support. Prisons should not be a revolving door into further criminality, as noble Lords have explained. Reduced education opportunities reinforce boredom and frustration, and they do not put people on the road to improvement. Too many people in prison have low or non-existent literacy and numeracy; that has to be addressed. It should be a core aim in prisons. It also, as we all know, makes violence more likely. People who cannot articulate in words turn to physical means. Cuts have left offenders without the skills to reintegrate into society. If our aim is to reduce reoffending then cutting education is at odds with that aim. The noble Lord, Lord Timpson, himself told the committee that he had walked past too many classrooms and workshops with no one sitting in them.

To turn to the issue of staffing, the Justice and Home Affairs Committee has underlined its alarm at the reductions. It has warned that they could jeopardise rehabilitation efforts and make reoffending levels harder to change. My noble friend Lady Bertin was absolutely right to stress the importance of recruitment and getting it right—recruiting enough of the right people in the right way and then keeping them. On staffing the evidence is unambiguous. Morale is low and experience is thin in key areas. Officers spend their shifts just trying to maintain order, with no time for purposeful engagement with prisoners—which is what we all want. Training reform must be accompanied by career progression improvements which recognise the professionalism of the job. Here I should mention the observations of my noble friend Lord Lucas. In his valuable contribution, he highlighted the importance of having the right governors in the right place for long enough, but not for overlong. From his experience in education, he stressed the value of mentoring. To conclude on the issue of staffing, we welcome the proposals for a Prison Service medal. I urge the Government to give this serious consideration.

Finally, I turn to accountability. The current independent inspection framework lacks effective enforcement powers when standards slip. Too many good recommendations from the Inspectorate of Prisons and independent monitoring boards are acknowledged but not then implemented. They lie in the shadows. The committee’s call for enhanced powers for inspectors and formalised collaboration between inspectorates must be taken seriously.

What matters now is for implementation reforms to work. We must prioritise education and training programmes, not cut them. We must support prison staff and not see them leave for better-resourced jobs. We must bolster the security and rehabilitation framework to deal with extremist threats concretely, consistently and effectively. We want a system that protects the public and gives those who can be reformed a genuine chance to go on to live a crime-free life.

This experienced committee’s report contains many wise recommendations—I can touch on only a few core points. The Government must now act on them. They have accepted the recommendations and we want action. I urge members of the committee to check on delivery. I hope that, in a year’s time, they will be asking questions in the House if this has not happened.